FEBRUARY 15, 1999:WHEN I WAS first told about this film I misheard the title
and thought it would be an ode to my favorite actor of all time,
Vic Tayback. Remember him from Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore,
where he played gruff-but-lovable short order cook Mel? And how
about his performance as lovable-albeit-gruff short order cook
Mel in the TV series Alice? Man, was that good. He also
played a variety of drill sergeants, crime bosses and irate customers.
I was so sad when he died before being able to play a dog catcher.

So anyway, Payback was not only not about Vic Tayback,
it had no reference to him...unless it was in the gruff-but-lovable
performance of Mel Gibson, who seemed to have had his face wired
shut for this role.

Mel G. plays the extremely evil Porter, who, like Cher and Madonna,
gets by on his looks. And only has one name.

It seems Porter had been shot six times and left for dead by
his wife Lynn and his best friend Val. They also stole $70,000
from him. U.S. dollars, not that worthless Canadian crap.

So of course, he's pissed off. Gruff, even. As soon as he recovers
from those nagging bullet wounds he begins to plot revenge.

In most movies, the main character is "likable." That
way, when he "kills" his "enemies" we "root"
for him. Here, instead, Mel is incessantly evil. He finds out
that a crime syndicate has his money, so he starts to go after
them.

For Porter, "going after" involves killing and beating
anyone who knows where his money might be. To break up the almost
ceaseless flow of violence, Porter also tries to reunite with
his lost love, a hooker whose heart, oddly enough, is made of
gold. She's played by the extremely fetching Maria Bello, who's
apparently slumming here after her critically acclaimed role in
Permanent Midnight.

The weird part about Porter is that he can callously kill dozens
of goons, slam his wife against a wall, and blow up a car full
of lowlifes, but he still gets all shy and mushy about the one
night he got to do Bello's prostitute character for free. I think
that Gibson put this into the story so as to tone down Porter's
gruffness and make him more lovable. (Gibson actually fired writer/director
Brian Helgeland mid-way through the shoot because he was worried
that his character was too unpleasant.)

Anyway, the film is at its best in the comically over-indulgent
violence and in the portrayal of the crime syndicate as wanna-be
'80s-style businessmen. The three bosses of the syndicate are
all played to parody by William Devane, James Coburn and Kris
Kristofferson.

Kristofferson's eyes have become so tiny and wrinkled that he
can only play high-powered criminals now, but he started out playing
romantic leads, perhaps most notably in the 1974 Martin Scorcese
film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. In Payback,
he's just Mel Gibson's comic book-style nemesis, whereas in Alice
he could stretch his acting muscles a bit more freely playing
opposite Ellen Burstyn's "Alice" and Vic Tayback's short-order
cook "Mel"....hey! Wait a minute....

OK, anyway, Payback is one of those films that's getting
reviled by the critics while packing 'em in at the box office,
and I can see why. The critics feel obliged to condemn anything
that's this violent and has no redeeming message. On the other
hand, the audiences see the violence as cartoony and campy, and
the dialogue is so clichéd as to be comic, even hilarious
at times. The overly refined friends who saw Payback with
me were squirming in their seats and begging to leave, so I imagine
that this one is not for everyone, but an exchange I had with
another friend pretty much sums this film up. I told him the movie
featured Ally McBeal star Lucy Liu in a leather bikini,
and he said, "Oh, you mean it's a good movie."

Well, it may not be the tribute to the greatest character actor
of Syrian descent to have starred in a TV series set in Arizona
(I'm speaking, of course, of Vic Tayback...Check him out in classic
teen film Loverboy, or in that episode of the original
Star Trek where they go to the planet of 1930s Chicago
Crime Bosses), but if by "good" you mean "excessively
violent and sleazy," then yeah, it's a good movie.

Which reminds me of an anecdote about Vic Tayback. One time I
had to get some photos of Vic for a project I was doing for a
comic book company. I went all over Manhattan looking, and every
movie memorabilia store I went to was devoid of Tayback. However,
they all told me to go to the mysterious Jerry Ohlinger's Movie
Material Store. So, finally, I did, descending into a one-room
basement parlor where I was greeted by Mr. Ohlinger. I asked him
for some Tayback, expecting to hear what I had heard at a dozen
other stores, that they didn't carry his picture, and would I
like to look at some photos of Tom Cruise instead. But Ohlinger
said "You mean from when he was in Alice or from his
guest appearance on Star Trek...nevermind, I'll just bring
out the Tayback file." He plopped a thick binder of photos
on the table, and I, surprised, told him how hard this stuff was
to find. "Yeah," he said, "Tayback's a bitch."